What drives the polarisation and moderation of opinions? Evidence from a Finnish citizen deliberation experiment on immigration

In the study of deliberation, a largely under‐explored area is why some participants polarise their opinion after deliberation and why others moderate them. Opinion polarisation is usually considered a suspicious outcome of deliberation, while moderation is seen as a desirable one. This article takes issue with this view. Results from a Finnish deliberative experiment on immigration show that polarisers and moderators were not different in socioeconomic, cognitive or affective profiles. Moreover, both polarisation and moderation can entail deliberatively desired pathways: in the experiment, both polarisers and moderators learned during deliberation, levels of empathy were fairly high on both sides, and group pressures barely mattered. Finally, the low physical presence of immigrants in some discussion groups was associated with polarisation in the anti‐immigrant direction, bolstering longstanding claims regarding the importance of presence for democratic politics.     

Sudan's Security Agencies: Fragmentation,Visibility and Mimicry, 1908–89

This article contends that, in the period under study, government security agencies in both colonial and post-colonial Sudan have failed to dominate society. It attributes this failure to the limited resources and limited ambitions of the state, and the fact that its security organs were thus weakly institutionalized. The fact that these failures persisted after independence, in spite of the efforts of post-colonial governments to expand their intelligence agencies, demonstrated the divisions within the state and the extent to which it could be captured by competing political and social groups.     

EU LEGISLATION AND NATIONAL REGULATION: UNCERTAIN STEPS TOWARDS A EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY

The EU with its supranational powers is a unique institution. Contrary to other international organizations, it can make laws that are binding to its member governments as well as to their citizens and enterprises. However, reviewing the literature, we find little consensus as to its true role as a lawmaker. This article and the articles that follow in this symposium remedy this empirical deficiency. The present article presents a comprehensive analysis of the scope of binding EU regulation. The EU is presented as an important lawmaker. It has, with considerable effectiveness, been able to overcome recurrent crises that have often called its very viability into question. But the same analysis also reveals that the EU, in spite of several treaty reforms expanding its responsibilities into new policy areas, remains a predominantly economic regulator. Finally, EU lawmaking is to an increasing extent delegated to the European Commission, dedicated to the de facto task of maintaining the internal market. Although this article and the articles that follow it cover the present, and refer to the European Union (EU), the EU, since its creation in the 1950s, has changed its official name several times.     

Book Reviews

Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey, The History of Diplomatic Immunity (Ohio State University Press: Columbus, Ohio, 1999), 727 pp. ISBN 0–8142–0740–5.

Winfried Baumgart, The Crimean War 1853–1856 (London: Edward Arnold, 1999). 244pp. £16.99 pb; £45 hb.

Bill Nasson, The South African War 1899–1902 (London: Arnold, 1999). xvi + 304 pp., maps. £45 hb ISBN 0–340–741546; £16.99 pb ISBN 0–340–614277.

Yigal Sheffy, British Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign 1914–1918 (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998). xviii + 380 pp. ISBN 0–7146–4677.

Carolyn J. Kitching, Britain and the Problem of International Disarmament 1919–1934 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). viii + 223 pp. £50.

Ray Moseley, Mussolini's Shadow. The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 302 pp. £19.95 hb ISBN 0–300–07917–6.

Peter Neville, Appeasing Hitler: The Diplomacy of Sir Nevile Henderson, 1937–39 (Houndmills and London: Macmillan Press Ltd and New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 2000). xv + 237 pp. £45 hb ISBN 0–333–73987–6.

Penderel Moon (ed.), Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997). xvi + 528 pp.; illus. No price given, hb ISBN 0–19–577128–1.

Gerald Stourzh, Um Einheit und Freiheit. Staatsvertrag, Neutralität und das Ende der Ost‐West‐Besetzung Österreichs 1945–1955 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1998), 831 pp.

Sue Onslow, Backbench Debate within the Conservative Party and Its Influence on British Foreign Policy, 1948–57 (London: Macmillan, 1997). xiii + 334 pp. ISBN 0–333–65637–7.     

Colonial education and the shaping of Islamism in Sudan, 1946–1956

Abstract

This article assesses the role of British colonial education in Condominium Sudan in shaping the mindsets of Sudan’s first generation of Islamists between 1946 and 1956. Drawing on post-colonial theorists such as Nandy and Bhabha, it contends that the experiences of the pioneers of Sudan’s Islamic movement at institutions such as Gordon Memorial College and Hantoub Secondary School moulded their understandings of both ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. As a result of their colonial education, Islamists deployed discourses concerning both ‘progress’ and ‘cultural authenticity’ that bore remarkable parallels with colonial essentialism, even as they announced a decisive break with the colonial past. Much like the conventional nationalists, they used the space created by the colonial educational institutions to establish an ideological community that transcended the narrow ethnic and regional divides previously fostered by the British. At the same time, Islamists and colonialists alike shared a contempt for Marxists and ‘deculturated’ effendis, and Muslim Brothers’ aspirations to escape the ‘English jahiliyya’, however counter-intuitive this may seem, bore similarities with the worldviews of colonial officials concerned with preventing what they saw to be the excessive impact of urbanization and modern education on Sudan.     

The frailties of prisons in post-colonial Sudan: from rehabilitation to retribution, 1956–1989

This article examines the slow eclipse of the rehabilitative ideal within the Sudanese prison system in the period from independence in 1956 till the removal of the third parliamentary regime in 1989. It contends that Ja^cfar Numayri's ‘Islamization’ of the criminal and penal system in 1983, which has been interpreted by some as an act of religious revival aiming to replace a series of externally imposed and European laws, cannot be understood purely in cultural terms. It will demonstrate that the Sudanese prison professionals of the post-colonial era pursued rehabilitative ideals with greater enthusiasm than their colonial predecessors. However, they were hampered by the limited resources offered to them by a government that became increasingly less interested in infrastructural social control and more concerned with exercising direct physical violence against both political and non-political transgessors of the state's law.